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Travels in West Africa

<h2>CHAPTER XVII. ASCENT OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS.</h2> Setting forth how the Voyager is minded to ascend the mountain called Mungo Mah Lobeh, or the Throne of Thunder, and in due course reaches Buea, situate thereon. After returning from Corisco I remained a few weeks in Gaboon, and then left on the Niger, commanded by Captain Davies.  My regrets, I should say, arose from leaving the charms and interests of Congo Français, and had nothing whatever to do with taking passage on one of the most comfortable ships of all those which call on the Coast. The Niger was homeward-bound when I joined her, and in due course arrived in Cameroon River, and I was once again under the dominion of Germany.  It would be a very interesting thing to compare the various forms of European government in Africa - English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish; but to do so with any justice would occupy more space than I have at my disposal, for the subject is extremely intricate.  Each of these forms of government have their good points and their bad.  Each of them are dealing with bits of Africa differing from each other - in the nature of their inhabitants and their formation, and so on - so I will not enter into any comparison of them here. From the deck of the Niger I found myself again confronted with my great temptation - the magnificent Mungo Mah Lobeh - the Throne of Thunder.  Now it is none of my business to go up mountains.  There’s next to no fish on them in West Africa, and precious little good rank fetish, as the population on them is sparse - the African, like myself, abhorring cool air.  Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that no white man has ever looked on the great Peak of Cameroon without a desire arising in his mind to ascend it and know in detail the highest point on the western side of the continent, and indeed one of the highest points in all Africa. So great is the majesty and charm of this mountain that the temptation of it is as great to me to-day as it was on the first day I saw it, when I was feeling my way down the West Coast of Africa on the S.S. Lagos in 1893, and it revealed itself by good chance from its surf-washed plinth to its skyscraping summit.  Certainly it is most striking when you see it first, as I first saw it, after coasting for weeks along the low shores and mangrove-fringed rivers of the Niger Delta.  Suddenly, right up out of the sea, rises the great mountain to its 13,760 feet, while close at hand, to westward, towers the lovely island mass of Fernando Po to 10,190 feet.  But every time you pass it by its beauty grows on you with greater and greater force, though it is never twice the same.  Sometimes it is wreathed with indigo-black tornado clouds, sometimes crested with snow, sometimes softly gorgeous with gold, green, and rose-coloured vapours tinted by the setting sun, sometimes completely swathed in dense cloud so that you cannot see it at all; but when you once know it is there it is all the same, and you bow down and worship. There are only two distinct peaks to this glorious thing that geologists brutally call the volcanic intrusive mass of the Cameroon Mountains, viz., Big Cameroon and Little Cameroon.  The latter, Mungo Mah Etindeh, has not yet been scaled, although it is only 5,820 feet.  One reason for this is doubtless that the few people in fever-stricken, over-worked West Africa who are able to go up mountains, naturally try for the adjacent Big Cameroon; the other reason is that Mungo Mah Etindeh, to which Burton refers as “the awful form of Little Cameroon,” is mostly sheer cliff, and is from foot to summit clothed in an almost impenetrable forest.  Behind these two mountains of volcanic origin, which cover an area on an isolated base of between 700 and 800 square miles in extent, there are distinctly visible from the coast two chains of mountains, or I should think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon ranges.  These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava. After spending a few pleasant days in Cameroon River in the society of Frau Plehn, my poor friend Mrs. Duggan having, I regret to say, departed for England on the death of her husband, I went round to Victoria, Ambas Bay, on the Niger, and in spite of being advised solemnly by Captain Davies to “chuck it as it was not a picnic,” I started to attempt the Peak of Cameroons as follows. September 20th, 1895. - Left Victoria at 7.30, weather fine.  Herr von Lucke, though sadly convinced, by a series of experiments he has been carrying on ever since I landed, and I expect before, that you cannot be in three places at one time, is still trying to do so; or more properly speaking he starts an experiment series for four places, man-like, instead of getting ill as I should under the circumstances, and he kindly comes with me as far as the bridge across the lovely cascading Lukole River, and then goes back at about seven miles an hour to look after Victoria and his sick subordinates in detail. I, with my crew, keep on up the grand new road the Government is making, which when finished is to go from Ambas Bay to Buea, 3,000 feet up on the mountain’s side.  This road is quite the most magnificent of roads, as regards breadth and general intention, that I have seen anywhere in West Africa, and it runs through a superbly beautiful country.  It is, I should say, as broad as Oxford Street; on either side of it are deep drains to carry off the surface waters, with banks of varied beautiful tropical shrubs and ferns, behind which rise, 100 to 200 feet high, walls of grand forest, the column-like tree-stems either hung with flowering, climbing plants and ferns, or showing soft red and soft grey shafts sixty to seventy feet high without an interrupting branch.  Behind this again rise the lovely foot hills of Mungo, high up against the sky, coloured the most perfect soft dark blue. The whole scheme of colour is indescribably rich and full in tone.  The very earth is a velvety red brown, and the butterflies - which abound - show themselves off in the sunlight, in their canary-coloured, crimson, and peacock-blue liveries, to perfection.  After five minutes’ experience of the road I envy those butterflies.  I do not believe there is a more lovely road in this world, and besides, it’s a noble and enterprising thing of a Government to go and make it, considering the climate and the country; but to get any genuine pleasure out of it, it is requisite to hover in a bird- or butterfly-like way, for of all the truly awful things to walk on, that road, when I was on it, was the worst. Of course this arose from its not being finished, not having its top on in fact: the bit that was finished, and had got its top on, for half a mile beyond the bridge, you could go over in a Bath chair.  The rest of it made you fit for one for the rest of your natural life, for it was one mass of broken lava rock, and here and there leviathan tree-stumps that had been partially blown up with gunpowder. When we near the forest end of the road, it comes on to rain heavily, and I see a little house on the left-hand side, and a European engineer superintending a group of very cheerful natives felling timber.  He most kindly invites me to take shelter, saying it cannot rain as heavily as this for long.  My men also announce a desire for water, and so I sit down and chat with the engineer under the shelter of his verandah, while the men go to the water-hole, some twenty minutes off. After learning much about the Congo Free State and other matters, I presently see one of my men sitting right in the middle of the road on a rock, totally unsheltered, and a feeling of shame comes over me in the face of this black man’s aquatic courage.  Into the rain I go, and off we start.  I conscientiously attempt to keep dry, by holding up an umbrella, knowing that though hopeless it is the proper thing to do. We leave the road about fifty yards above the hut, turning into the unbroken forest on the right-hand side, and following a narrow, slippery, muddy, root-beset bush-path that was a comfort after the road.  Presently we come to a lovely mountain torrent flying down over red-brown rocks in white foam; exquisitely lovely, and only a shade damper than the rest of things.  Seeing this I solemnly fold up my umbrella and give it to Kefalla.  I then take charge of Fate and wade. This particular stream, too, requires careful wading, the rocks over which it flows being arranged in picturesque, but perilous confusion; however all goes well, and getting to the other side I decide to “chuck it,” as Captain Davies would say, as to keeping dry, for the rain comes down heavier than ever. Now we are evidently dealing with a foot-hillside, but the rain is too thick for one to see two yards in any direction, and we seem to be in a ghost-land forest, for the great palms and red-woods rise up in the mist before us, and fade out in the mist behind, as we pass on.  The rocks which edge and strew the path at our feet are covered with exquisite ferns and mosses - all the most delicate shades of green imaginable, and here and there of absolute gold colour, looking as if some ray of sunshine had lingered too long playing on the earth, and had got shut off from heaven by the mist, and so lay nestling among the rocks until it might rejoin the sun. The path now becomes an absolute torrent, with mud-thickened water, which cascades round one’s ankles in a sportive way, and round one’s knees in the hollows in the path.  On we go, the path underneath the water seems a pretty equal mixture of rock and mud, but they are not evenly distributed.  Plantations full of weeds show up on either side of us, and we are evidently now on the top of a foot-hill.  I suspect a fine view of the sea could be obtained from here, if you have an atmosphere that is less than 99¾ per cent. of water.  As it is, a white sheet - or more properly speaking, considering its soft, stuffy woolliness, a white blanket - is stretched across the landscape to the south-west, where the sea would show. We go down-hill now, the water rushing into the back of my shoes for a change.  The path is fringed by high, sugar-cane-like grass which hangs across it in a lackadaisical way, swishing you in the face and cutting like a knife whenever you catch its edge, and pouring continually insidious rills of water down one’s neck.  It does not matter.  The whole Atlantic could not get more water on to me than I have already got.  Ever and again I stop and wring out some of it from my skirts, for it is weighty.  One would not imagine that anything could come down in the way of water thicker than the rain, but it can.  When one is on the top of the hills, a cold breeze comes through the mist chilling one to the bone, and bending the heads of the palm trees, sends down from them water by the bucketful with a slap; hitting or missing you as the case may be. Both myself and my men are by now getting anxious for our “chop,” and they tell me, “We look them big hut soon.”  Soon we do look them big hut, but with faces of undisguised horror, for the big hut consists of a few charred roof-mats, etc., lying on the ground.  There has been a fire in that simple savage home.  Our path here is cut by one that goes east and west, and after a consultation between my men and the Bakwiri, we take the path going east, down a steep slope between weedy plantations, and shortly on the left shows a steep little hill-side with a long low hut on the top.  We go up to it and I find it is the habitation of a Basel Mission black Bible-reader.  He comes out and speaks English well, and I tell him I want a house for myself and my men, and he says we had better come and stay in this one.  It is divided into two chambers, one in which the children who attend the mission-school stay, and wherein there is a fire, and one evidently the abode of the teacher.  I thank the Bible-reader and say that I will pay him for the house, and I and the men go in streaming, and my teeth chatter with cold as the breeze chills my saturated garment while I give out the rations of beef, rum, blankets, and tobacco to the men.  Then I clear my apartment out and attempt to get dry, operations which are interrupted by Kefalla coming for tobacco to buy firewood off the mission teacher to cook our food by. Presently my excellent little cook brings in my food, and in with it come two mission teachers - our first acquaintance, the one with a white jacket, and another with a blue.  They lounge about and spit in all directions, and then chiefs commence to arrive with their families complete, and they sidle into the apartment and ostentatiously ogle the demijohn of rum. They are, as usual, a nuisance, sitting about on everything.  No sooner have I taken an unclean-looking chief off the wood sofa, than I observe another one has silently seated himself in the middle of my open portmanteau.  Removing him and shutting it up, I see another one has settled on the men’s beef and rice sack. It is now about three o’clock and I am still chilled to the bone in spite of tea.  The weather is as bad as ever.  The men say that the rest of the road to Buea is far worse than that which we have so far come along, and that we should never get there before dark, and “for sure” should not get there afterwards, because by the time the dark came down we should be in “bad place too much.”  Therefore, to their great relief, I say I will stay at this place - Buana - for the night, and go on in the morning time up to Buea; and just for the present I think I will wrap myself up in a blanket and try and get the chill out of me, so I give the chiefs a glass of rum each, plenty of head tobacco, and my best thanks for their kind call, and then turn them all out.  I have not been lying down five minutes on the plank that serves for a sofa by day and a bed by night, when Charles comes knocking at the door.  He wants tobacco.  “Missionary man no fit to let we have firewood unless we buy em.”  Give Charles a head and shut him out again, and drop off to sleep again for a quarter of an hour, then am aroused by some enterprising sightseers pushing open the window-shutters; when I look round there are a mass of black heads sticking through the window-hole.  I tell them respectfully that the circus is closed for repairs, and fasten up the shutters, but sleep is impossible, so I turn out and go and see what those men of mine are after.  They are comfortable enough round their fire, with their clothes suspended on strings in the smoke above them, and I envy them that fire.  I then stroll round to see if there is anything to be seen, but the scenery is much like that you would enjoy if you were inside a blanc-mange.  So as it is now growing dark I return to my room and light candles, and read Dr. Günther on Fishes.  Room becomes full of blacks.  Unless you watch the door, you do not see how it is done.  You look at a corner one minute and it is empty, and the next time you look that way it is full of rows of white teeth and watching eyes.  The two mission teachers come in and make a show of teaching a child to read the Bible.  After again clearing out the rank and fashion of Buana, I prepare to try and get a sleep; not an elaborate affair, I assure you, for I only want to wrap myself round in a blanket and lie on that plank, but the rain has got into the blankets and horror! there is no pillow.  The mission men have cleared their bed paraphernalia right out.  Now you can do without a good many things, but not without a pillow, so hunt round to find something to make one with; find the Bible in English, the Bible in German, and two hymn-books, and a candle-stick.  These seem all the small articles in the room - no, there is a parcel behind the books - mission teachers’ Sunday trousers - make delightful arrangement of books bound round with trousers and the whole affair wrapped in one of my towels.  Never saw till now advantage of Africans having trousers.  Civilisation has its points after all.  But it is no use trying to get any sleep until those men are quieter.  The partition which separates my apartment from theirs is a bamboo and mat affair, straight at the top so leaving under the roof a triangular space above common to both rooms.  Also common to both rooms are the smoke of the fire and the conversation.  Kefalla is holding forth in a dogmatic way, and some of the others are snoring.  There is a new idea in decoration along the separating wall.  Mr. Morris might have made something out of it for a dado.  It is composed of an arrangement in line of stretched out singlets.  Vaseline the revolver.  Wish those men would leave off chattering.  Kefalla seems to know the worst about most of the people, black and white, down in Ambas Bay, but I do not believe those last two stories.  Evidently great jokes in next room now; Kefalla has thrown himself, still talking, in the dark, on to the top of one of the mission teachers.  The women of the village outside have been keeping up, this hour and more, a most melancholy coo-ooing.  Those foolish creatures are evidently worrying about their husbands who have gone down to market in Ambas Bay, and who, they think, are lost in the bush.  I have not a shadow of a doubt that those husbands who are not home by now are safely drunk in town, or reposing on the grand new road the kindly Government have provided for them, either in one of the side drains, or tucked in among the lava rock. September 21st. - Coo-ooing went on all night.  I was aroused about 9.30 P.M., by uproar in adjacent hut: one husband had returned in a bellicose condition and whacked his wives, and their squarks and squalls, instead of acting as a warning to the other ladies, stimulate the silly things to go on coo-ooing louder and more entreatingly than ever, so that their husbands might come home and whack them too, I suppose, and whenever the unmitigated hardness of my plank rouses me I hear them still coo-ooing. No watchman is required to wake you in the morning on the top of a Cameroon foot-hill by 5.30, because about 4 A.M. the dank chill that comes before the dawn does so most effectively.  One old chief turned up early out of the mist and dashed me a bottle of palm wine; he says he wants to dash me a fowl, but I decline, and accept two eggs, and give him four heads of tobacco. The whole place is swathed in thick white mist through which my audience arrive.  But I am firm with them, and shut up the doors and windows and disregard their bangings on them while I am dressing, or rather re-dressing.  The mission teachers get in with my tea, and sit and smoke and spit while I have my breakfast.  Give me cannibal Fans! It is pouring with rain again now, and we go down the steep hillock to the path we came along yesterday, keep it until we come to where the old path cuts it, and then turn up to the right following the old path’s course and leave Buana without a pang of regret.  Our road goes N.E.  Oh, the mud of it!  Not the clearish cascades of yesterday but sticky, slippery mud, intensely sticky, and intensely slippery.  The narrow path which is filled by this, is V-shaped underneath from wear, and I soon find the safest way is right through the deepest mud in the middle. The white mist shuts off all details beyond ten yards in any direction.  All we can see, as we first turn up the path, is a patch of kokos of tremendous size on our right.  After this comes weedy plantation, and stretches of sword grass hanging across the road.  The country is even more unlevel than that we came over yesterday.  On we go, patiently doing our mud pulling through the valleys; toiling up a hillside among lumps of rock and stretches of forest, for we are now beyond Buana’s plantations; and skirting the summit of the hill only to descend into another valley.  Evidently this is a succession of foot-hills of the great mountain and we are not on its true face yet.  As we go on they become more and more abrupt in form, the valleys mere narrow ravines.  In the wet season (this is only the tornado season) each of these valleys is occupied by a raging torrent from the look of the confused water-worn boulders.  Now among the rocks there are only isolated pools, for the weather for a fortnight before I left Victoria had been fairly dry, and this rich porous soil soaks up an immense amount of water.  It strikes me as strange that when we are either going up or down the hills, the ground is less muddy than when we are skirting their summits, but it must be because on the inclines the rush of water clears the soil away down to the bed rock.  There is an outcrop of clay down by Buana, but though that was slippery, it is nothing to the slipperiness of this fine, soft, red-brown earth that is the soil higher up, and also round Ambas Bay.  This gets churned up into a sort of batter where there is enough water lying on it, and, when there is not, an ice slide is an infant to it. My men and I flounder about; thrice one of them, load and all, goes down with a squidge and a crash into the side grass, and says “damn!” with quite the European accent; as a rule, however, we go on in single file, my shoes giving out a mellifluous squidge, and their naked feet a squish, squash.  The men take it very good temperedly, and sing in between accidents; I do not feel much like singing myself, particularly at one awful spot, which was the exception to the rule that ground at acute angles forms the best going.  This exception was a long slippery slide down into a ravine with a long, perfectly glassy slope up out of it. After this we have a stretch of rocky forest, and pass by a widening in the path which I am told is a place where men blow, i.e. rest, and then pass through another a little further on, which is Buea’s bush market.  Then through an opening in the great war-hedge of Buea, a growing stockade some fifteen feet high, the lower part of it wattled. At the sides of the path here grow banks of bergamot and balsam, returning good for evil and smiling sweetly as we crush them.  Thank goodness we are in forest now, and we seem to have done with the sword-grass.  The rocks are covered with moss and ferns, and the mist curling and wandering about among the stems is very lovely. In our next ravine there is a succession of pools, part of a mountain torrent of greater magnitude evidently than those we have passed, and in these pools there are things swimming.  Spend more time catching them, with the assistance of Bum.  I do not value Kefalla’s advice, ample though it is, as being of any real value in the affair.  Bag some water-spiders and two small fish.  The heat is less oppressive than yesterday.  All yesterday one was being alternately smothered in the valley and chilled on the hill-tops.  To-day it is a more level temperature, about 70°, I fancy. The soil up here, about 2,500 feet above sea-level, though rock-laden is exceedingly rich, and the higher we go there is more bergamot, native indigo, with its underleaf dark blue, and lovely coleuses with red markings on their upper leaves, and crimson linings.  I, as an ichthyologist, am in the wrong paradise.  What a region this would be for a botanist! The country is gloriously lovely if one could only see it for the rain and mist; but one only gets dim hints of its beauty when some cold draughts of wind come down from the great mountains and seem to push open the mist-veil as with spirit hands, and then in a minute let it fall together again.  I do not expect to reach Buea within regulation time, but at 11.30 my men say “we close in,” and then, coming along a forested hill and down a ravine, we find ourselves facing a rushing river, wherein a squad of black soldiers are washing clothes, with the assistance of a squad of black ladies, with much uproar and sky-larking.  I too think it best to wash here, standing in the river and swishing the mud out of my skirts; and then wading across to the other bank, I wring out my skirts.  The ground on the further side of the river is cleared of bush, and only bears a heavy crop of balsam; a few steps onwards bring me in view of a corrugated iron-roofed, plank-sided house, in front of which, towards the great mountain which now towers up into the mist, is a low clearing with a quadrangle of native huts - the barracks. I receive a most kindly welcome from a fair, grey-eyed German gentleman, only unfortunately I see my efforts to appear before him clean and tidy have been quite unavailing, for he views my appearance with unmixed horror, and suggests an instant hot bath.  I decline.  Men can be trying!  How in the world is any one going to take a bath in a house with no doors, and only very sketchy wooden window-shutters? The German officer is building the house quickly, as Ollendorff would say, but he has not yet got to such luxuries as doors, and so uses army blankets strung across the doorway; and he has got up temporary wooden shutters to keep the worst of the rain out, and across his own room’s window he has a frame covered with greased paper.  Thank goodness he has made a table, and a bench, and a washhand-stand out of planks for his spare room, which he kindly places at my disposal; and the Fatherland has evidently stood him an iron bedstead and a mattress for it.  But the Fatherland is not spoiling or cosseting this man to an extent that will enervate him in the least. The mist clears off in the evening about five, and the surrounding scenery is at last visible.  Fronting the house there is the cleared quadrangle, facing which on the other three sides are the lines of very dilapidated huts, and behind these the ground rises steeply, the great S.E. face of Mungo Mah Lobeh.  It looks awfully steep when you know you have got to go up it.  This station at Buea is 3,000 feet above sea-level, which explains the hills we have had to come up.  The mountain wall when viewed from Buea is very grand, although it lacks snowcap or glacier, and the highest summits of Mungo are not visible because we are too close under them, but its enormous bulk and its isolation make it highly impressive.  The forest runs up it in a great band above Buea, then sends up great tongues into the grass belt above.  But what may be above this grass belt I know not yet, for our view ends at the top of the wall of the great S.E. crater.  My men say there are devils and gold up beyond, but the German authorities do not support this view.  Those Germans are so sceptical.  This station is evidently on a ledge, for behind it the ground falls steeply, and you get an uninterrupted panoramic view of the Cameroon estuary and the great stretches of low swamp lands with the Mungo and the Bimbia rivers, and their many creeks and channels, and far away east the strange abrupt forms of the Rumby Mountains.  Herr Liebert says you can see Cameroon Government buildings from here, if only the day is clear, though they are some forty miles away.  This view of them is, save a missionary of the Basel mission, the only white society available at Buea. I hear more details about the death of poor Freiherr von Gravenreuth, whose fine monument of a seated lion I saw in the Government House grounds in Cameroons the other day.  Bush fighting in these West African forests is dreadfully dangerous work.  Hemmed in by bush, in a narrow path along which you must pass slowly in single file, you are a target for all and any natives invisibly hidden in the undergrowth; and the war-hedge of Buea must have made an additional danger and difficulty here for the attacking party.  The lieutenant and his small band of black soldiers had, after a stiff fight, succeeded in forcing the entrance to this, when their ammunition gave out, and they had to fall back.  The Bueans, regarding this as their victory, rallied, and a chance shot killed the lieutenant instantly.  A further expedition was promptly sent up from Victoria and it wiped the error out of the Buean mind and several Bueans with it.  But it was a very necessary expedition.  These natives were a constant source of danger to the more peaceful trading tribes, whom they would not permit to traverse their territory.  The Bueans have been dealt with mercifully by the Germans, for their big villages, like Sapa, are still standing, and a continual stream of natives come into the barrack-yard, selling produce, or carrying it on down to Victoria markets, in a perfectly content and cheerful way.  I met this morning a big burly chief with his insignia of office - a great stick.  He, I am told, is the chief or Sapa whom Herr von Lucke has called to talk some palaver with down in Victoria. At last I leave Herr Liebert, because everything I say to him causes him to hop, flying somewhere to show me something, and I am sure it is bad for his foot.  I go and see that my men are safely quartered.  Kefalla is laying down the law in a most didactic way to the soldiers.  Herr Liebert has christened him “the Professor,” and I adopt the name for him, but I fear “Windbag” would fit him better. At 7.30 a heavy tornado comes rolling down upon us.  Masses of indigo cloud with livid lightning flashing in the van, roll out from over the wall of the great crater above; then with that malevolence peculiar to the tornado it sees all the soldiers and their wives and children sitting happily in the barrack yard, howling in a minor key and beating their beloved tom-toms, so it comes and sits flump down on them with deluges of water, and sends its lightning running over the ground in livid streams of living death.  Oh, they are nice things are tornadoes!  I wonder what they will be like when we are up in their home; up atop of that precious wall?  I had no idea Mungo was so steep.  If I had - well, I am in for it now! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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